What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)

by T. Kingfisher

(Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)

Very few ancient crypts have plump shepherdesses and gamboling sheep on the walls. I consider this an oversight.

(I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.)

I offered Denton my hand, because Americans will shake hands with the table if you don’t stop them.

I did not know how to deal with this sort of death, the one that comes slow and inevitable and does not let go. I am a soldier, I deal in cannonballs and rifle shots.

“I am not a woman, I am a soldier!”

Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.

I’d been tired of it a decade ago. Now I’d moved to some other state entirely. Transcendent exhaustion, perhaps. Which had less to do with Dr. Denton and more to do with the ten thousand or so people before him.

“It’s a holdover from the war,” I said, thinking of my own tinnitus. “Too many shells, too many bullets. We’re all half-deaf and hearing things.”

“I am not the soldier I was.” “None of us are what we were,”

Could you even burn a lake? I know there was a river in America that caught fire once, and had made the papers as an amusing footnote about how the Yanks could even make water burn, but I vaguely recalled there had been some kind of chemicals involved.

“For,” he said, “the Good Lord may look out for fools, but it won’t hurt to have another set of eyes helping.”

“One of the fine, fierce old ladies of England. They’ll climb mountains and make tea on the summit if they need to. We’d have done a damn sight better in the war if they’d sent them over instead of the troops.”

“They say mushrooms spring up where the Devil walks,” said Angus sourly. “And where fairies dance.”

“You shouldn’t joke about fairies. Sir.”

Horses don’t understand a lot about the world, but I have found that they sometimes understand particular humans terrifyingly well. Mules understand a lot more about the world, but less about humans—or possibly they just don’t care what humans think.

It must have been terribly galling to be barred from an organization merely because one lacked the proper genitals, when disreputable Americans were allowed to join

Our civilization is built on the back of yeasts.”

There are people who sleep with a loaded gun under their pillow and I’ve nothing much to say about that, except that I would not choose to share a bed with them.

“The Good Lord looks out for fools. In your case, apparently He sends the occasional Englishwoman.”

It was fun. People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it’s generally cheaper to obtain.

We toasted Gallacia and Ruravia, and Denton gagged and Roderick and I cheered on this completely normal response to livrit. Then we toasted America and the taste buds her son had lost that day. Then we toasted a couple more things, including Maddy’s beauty, fallen comrades, and the foolishness of armies. And then we parted and went to bed, and that was the last remotely normal day in the house of Usher.

He had always been jumpy. Nothing wrong with that. Jumpy means you survive. It also means you wear yourself out faster

(A Frenchwoman once told me that I had no poetry in my soul. I recited a dirty limerick to her, and she threw a lemon at my head. Paris is a marvelous city.)

“I’m starting to wonder if there really is something in the water. Something fatal.” Hob expressed that lack of apples might prove equally fatal.

His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are. It’s like telling stories at the bar about the worst pain you’ve ever been in. You laugh and you brag about it, and it turns the pain into something that will buy you a drink.

I knew just enough to know that I could not appreciate just how far beyond me it truly was.

I came into the room and thumped him on the back and did all the things that soldiers do with each other because most of us have forgotten how to cry.

The other part of me knew that he was a doctor and I was just a soldier, and the death I knew was not a subtle thing.

“The dead are dead. They don’t care.”

“Certain of what?” “That the dead don’t walk,”

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio’

I don’t know how long we sat there after that, drinking our courage. Too long, probably. But sooner or later you have to act or resign yourself to not acting at all.

(We did not run. If we ran then we would have to admit there was something to run from. If we ran, then the small child that lives in every soldier’s heart knew that the monsters could get us. So we did not run, but it was a near thing.)